1. Happy all the time

Here is what I learned, as a little boy, about the texture of our life in Jesus Christ, the Crucified One.

I'm inright, outright, upright, downright happy all the time.

I'm inright, outright, upright, downright happy all the time.

Since Jesus Christ came in and cleansed my heart from sin,

I'm inright, outright, upright, downright happy all the time.

I sang this gospel chorus, and many others like it, as a participant in the profusion of spiritual drills spawned by a new evangelicalism after World War II. And so did several generations of evangelical children and the adults whose anxieties hovered over and shaped those spiritual drills. Now we have come of age as those who, if Mark Noll is right, do not exercise our minds for Christ. I wonder if there is a connection. I wonder if those happy little jingles, representing and reinforcing a closed universe of evangelical rhetoric, snatched away my freedom to inhabit fully the complicated human world inside me where terror and joy, loss and recovery, oscillate capriciously. I wonder if, in so doing, those jingles snatched away my freedom to think.

We sang this jingle because we were saved. At six, or maybe eight years old, the biggest questions of our lives had been answered. We had found it. However the fine points of our doctrine might nuance this conversion experience—the controlling mechanism for all that we label "evangelical"--we were fixed. And what had fixed us, and only that, could fix the world. So we became fixers, not thinkers. Our own brokenness and the brokenness of the world need never again confront us as an invitation to think.

It is important to remember that this happy new evangelicalism was energized by fundamentalist youth evangelists during the 1930s and '40s. Death seemed firmly in the driver's seat in those years; some note of Christ's victory needed to be heard, and felt. I thank them for bringing hope to anxious people in dark times. But I wish they had been better equipped, theologically and personally, to see how the life vest that holds us up in the storm can become a straitjacket that keeps us from exploring what lies below the waves.

Walker Percy tells us a novelist is someone who says: "I don't feel so good. Do you?" This is also true of the thinkers I admire. We all have our own lists of world-class thinkers, ones who intrigue or infuriate us, who push forward our understanding and raise the important questions. My list would include Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Weber, Bakhtin, Lacan, Ernest Becker, Julia Kristeva, John Caputo, Toni Morrison, Shusaku Endo, Simone Weil. These people are not happy all the time. They are free to acknowledge and explore their painful awareness that all things human—including human knowledge—are badly broken; they know this brokenness reaches to the center of their own beings.

We have all encountered people who insist that they are happy all the time. Do we sometimes sense in them an unhappiness too deep for words, an unhappiness constituting a danger zone, entry prohibited? It may be well for them to stay out of that danger zone. But if they do, how will they tap the wellsprings of creativity hidden in that same danger zone? Will they be free to think?

2. The nostalgia for the whole and the one

Among the progenitors of the new evangelicalism there were not only preachers, but also scholars, staffing the growing evangelical seminaries and colleges, writing books, publishing in evangelical magazines. Like the evangelists, these scholars promoted a kind of happiness. They recoiled from the crabbed judgmentalism, defeatism, anti-intellectualism of their fundamentalist fathers. They saw no reason to cower before the strictures of logic or the prejudices of the modern mind. They strode confidently into the intellectual arena, convinced that Christians belonged there as much as anyone else. They were right about this, and I thank them for their courage.

But though they called themselves evangelicals, fundamentalist hearts beat in their chests. They, too, were saved. They believed they knew the answer, that their words captured objective truth in a rational form persuasive to any truly inquiring mind. They called this answer a Christian world-view; it reflected the mind of God. They knew they were right about life's most important questions.

When I put myself in their place, I feel their exhilaration. They had seen their fathers peer self-consciously out of the grimy windows of a shabby fundamentalist boardinghouse, while, across the street, the smart set of culture and academia basked in the splendor of the Enlightenment Hotel. Enough of that, they said, as they strode across the boulevard and through the glittering doors, pushed their way to the front desk, and demanded their room keys. How could they know that the place was already going up in flames, longtime inhabitants dropping from smoke inhalation or scurrying with Nietzsche out the back?

My own fundamentalist heart knows the intoxication of being right, and I must be warned against judging my forebears by postmodernism's rickety hindsight. But I am unpersuaded by my colleagues, who argue that it was necessary to embrace a rationalist epistemology in order to defend the faith from the attacks of that same epistemology. Decades before, Karl Barth had shown another way. The treatment accorded him by evangelicals gives no indication that their minds or their hearts were open. Of course, we may not ourselves be in charge of the opening and closing of our own ears.

The thinkers and writers I'm drawn to, however, don't spend time proving that they're absolutely right. They don't believe that unless their ideas conform to the timeless truths of an eternal mind, their goose is cooked. They grow and change, and their ideas with them. They have the freedom to think, which means the freedom to articulate ideas that are half-baked, outrageous, and possibly wrong. We have all encountered individuals who insist that their answers are absolutely right. Perhaps, as college students, we envied their immunity to surprise, attended their debates with unbelievers, cheered their victories. But now, don't alarm bells ring in their presence? Do we sense panic beneath their certitudes? Do we detect, in their thinking, an evasion of thinking and suspect they may be afraid of a new idea?

This feature of the evangelical spirit—an anxiety more often felt than articulated, but shaping the atmosphere of our evangelical colleges—suggests a facetious second verse to the theme chorus of my youth: I'm inright, outright, upright, downright RIGHT all the time.

3. The command economy of the soul

I'm sure the irony is not lost on Mark Noll—that his lament in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind tolls the fiftieth anniversary of a vigorous campaign to revive the evangelical mind. Noll's argument for intellectual engagement has long represented the reigning ideology on evangelical campuses. It has generated books and articles and weeklong chapel series, inspired mission statements and revamped curricula, stimulated so many faculty workshops that the very words "all truth is God's truth" make us want to run out into the street with our hands over our heads. For 50 years we have heard that God wants us to use our minds, and Noll tells us there is no evangelical mind. Maybe there's something wrong with our approach.

Here is what I think is wrong with our approach. Like most rationalists, we think of the interior world as a command economy. The disinterested self stands at attention like a good little soldier, awaiting instructions from God. To get Christians to do, or believe, or feel something, it's enough to convince them God commands it. Of course, the command to think as scholars does not ring out from the pages of Scripture. So we have to get there by way of syllogisms. You know what I'm talking about: God made your mind, what minds do is think, so God made you to think. Or: We're commanded to love God with our minds, what minds do is think, so thinking is the way to love God. Every book I've read encouraging evangelical intellect leans on a syllogism of this sort and features a commanding God.

At six, or maybe eight years old,

the biggest questions of our lives had

been answered. We had found it.

I don't believe that the soul is a rationalistic command economy. I believe the ears of faith hear a loving God's commands as permission for the full flowering of one's being, and that joyous responses—including creative thinking—flow spontaneously from that permission. But the evangelical God—the one preached in most of our churches and chapel services—does not offer that permission. So we are not thinkers.

4. The problem is the commander, not the command

As a kid, I was commanded to love God. I tried earnestly to do so. But a steady diet of Sunday school stories and revival sermons left my young heart doubting God's love for me. I was to love a person who commanded me, under threat of eternal hellfire, to love him? Would I love the neighborhood bully if he grabbed me on the street and commanded me to love him? My only recourse was to redefine love as an act of will and redouble my willful efforts to love God. It was a turning point in my adult life when I admitted I had lost the battle. I didn't love the evangelical God.

Just as it stultifies genuine love, the command economy of evangelical rationalism stultifies genuine thought. We've heard the command to think. But from whom have we heard it? From the magisterial, all-knowing, all-powerful Sovereign who delights in issuing eternal decrees. From a God who is moralistic, impassible, demanding, and often distant; who governs the world according to a predetermined plan; who has virtually systematized the truth of all things in the Bible, and expects us to get it right; who is positively unpleasant in the face of error or doubt.

Of course, this is not the careful portrait of the theologians. But for many of us—more, I believe, than are aware of it—the careful portraits are in our heads, and another God lives in our guts. The command to think, coming from the God in our guts, can only have a chilling effect on genuine thinking, because what is important to him is to get it right.

I have worked all my life with young evangelicals in whose hearts the good news of God's love is confusingly intermixed with the bad news of a demanding God. I've watched many of them struggle to think in the presence of this God and under the institutional restraints imposed in his name. Some have turned away from their own most genuine questions in order (as they believed) to preserve their relationships with an exacting God or their credentials in an exacting subculture. Some have bolted the evangelical fold so that their thought might actually take its course. We chase away the very ones who hold the most promise for the revival of a Christian mind because we give them the command but not the freedom to think.

5. The sorrowful one

The fathers of the new evangelicalism did not seem particularly interested in the flesh-and-blood Jesus. They hardly spoke of him. Their Jesus was a mirror reflecting a big God they discovered elsewhere, resplendent in his sovereignty, moral perfection, holiness, justice.I am suspicious of their inclinations. I'm willing to gamble that the flesh-and-blood Jesus, for all his lack of philosophical comeliness, might free us to think where the stern commands of the Almighty have failed. Of course, I am talking about a Jesus I have met. Others seem to have met somebody different.

He appears out of nowhere, an itinerant preacher, a winemaker, a reluctant healer. He seems relaxed, roams from town to town responding to the call of human faces and other beckonings only his ears can hear. He resists miracles, does miracles, tries to keep them secret. He likes losers and knaves, and they like him. He fishes for persons, but it is enough when they go away annoyed, confused, or sorrowful. He slips away from crowds, seems at home with silence. It's not recorded that he laughs. He spits on eyes, writes in the dirt, breaks rules. He is a most unsystematic thinker, answering questions with stories or riddles. In the hearing of his mother he asks: Who is my mother? He calls the Pharisees all manner of bad names, then speaks warmly of them as his little chicks, predicts they will someday hail his coming. He promises to bring a sword but goes to the slaughter like a lamb.1

What would it mean to be discipled by a slaughtered lamb? By one who knows that his suffering and his death will finally draw every one of us to him?

I think Simon Peter knew. His discipleship is distilled in two stories about drowning. In the first, Jesus invites Peter to walk the troubled waters, and Peter sinks. This Rock, foundation for a church, is one that sinks. He flails, and a hand grabs him, and like a drowning rat he scurries back into the frail safety of his little boat.

In the second story, now on dry land, Peter drowns again—this time in a sea of tears. He is warming himself at a fire, and behind the wall they're torturing the one whose hand held him in the waves. Peter hears himself saying: "I do not know that man." The text says Peter wept bitterly (Matt. 26:75).

Here is the crux of Peter's discipleship to the slaughtered lamb, in my reading of it: At any moment, at many moments, Peter's confident strides on the driest of dry land will be interrupted by the repetition of those events in which he discovered himself to be drowning. Saved from drowning, yes; but saved to know himself as one who sputters and who sinks; a human being who lives each day between "I do not know the man" and "Lord, save me."

Peter is saved—saved from having to be happy, or right, or good; saved from having to be anything. He knows the freedom that comes when nothing he feels or thinks or does, or anything else in life or in death, can separate him from the love of God in Christ Jesus his Lord. With his brother Paul, another drowning man, he will surely say: "I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified," and these words, though rising from a deep and thoughtful spirit, will not seek to camouflage their origin in weakness, nor to represent their speaker as anything but a human being. And as human, one who is held precariously amid the waves not by moral absolutes, doctrinal certainties, or rational foundations but by that which seems, to one who has not grasped it, frightfully insubstantial: a hand of flesh, pierced by a nail from the foundation of the world.

Peter will not need a command to think. As a human being in whom the passion of Christ has been awakened, he will be free: to weep and to laugh, to stumble and to dance, to curse and to bless. And yes: to think, and sometimes not to think.

6. The freedom to be a mess

Not long before his death in 1980, the French priest Jean Sulivan wrote this in his journal:

Instead of satisfying our desires, Jesus sends us back to ourselves at a deeper level. Morality, politics, economics, the intellectual harmony I keep looking for—none of these are his concern. He points in another direction; he drives me toward nothingness.2

I have a friend who, for many months, has mourned his wife's death. He has taught me what it means to drown. He has suffered ceaseless waves of grief and rage, of utter confusion and yawning emptiness. He has seen the Nothing. He knows the desperation of "Lord, save me" and has flung "I never knew the man" into the face of a thunderingly silent God. The words of the flesh-and-blood Jesus, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" are his words too.

I have witnessed in my friend the demise of every doctrinal certainty, every cheap equanimity. But I have also witnessed his birth as a deeper and fuller human being. His ears seem tuned to a place inside him that he trusts to let him know what he needs and what he wants, what is true and what is not. A portion of those energies that, previously, he used in being nice, he now invests in being real. He is less concerned about the judgment of others. He seems free to bring the raw, bleeding mess that he is to his human encounters, and people leave him feeling cared for. He comes to his intellectual endeavors as this mess, and I believe that he is freer to think with creativity and conviction.

The scholars and storytellers I love to read seem to have gained this freedom to be a mess. I hear in their work the mournful tones of those who have sunk beneath the waves. Each reflects a different way station on the journey of a suffering human spirit: anger, despair, sadness, tenderness, compassion, joy. Often their writing brims with humor, but it is a humor that has taken sadness up into itself. They have experienced the frailty of human knowledge in holding back the night and the spiritual cost of trying to make it do so. Knowing they don't represent God or Truth, as if the world or their minds were somehow whole, they can represent themselves; and if they are gifted, "themselves" is what opens new worlds for human perception. They bring to the human conversation resources mined from suffering hearts—resources of feeling, intuition, imagination, spirit. They are free to embrace, in sadness and in celebration, the wildly variegated human species just as it is. Their existence in this world, more than most of what I read by fellow evangelicals, convinces me that Jesus lives.

We evangelicals prefer the known track

and the familiar thing. We're not eager

to follow the Crucified One

off into the dark.

Of course, many of them do not profess Christian faith, and some are quite hostile to it. But from some corner of the universe they have gained permission to be human. Perhaps it is as Jesus said: "The wind blows where it wills." In some fragmentary way, they have heard the foolishness of the Cross: that there is at the heart of things One who weeps with us, One who accompanies us into the brokenness of things, the brokenness of ourselves, in order to lead us to freedom, to joy, to life.

7. The morass of subjectivity

Hazel Motes, the wacky preacher in Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood, is haunted by the Jesus who "move[s] from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he [is] not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown." Hazel wishes he could stay closer to home "with his two eyes open, and his hands always handling the familiar thing, his feet on the known track, and his tongue not too loose."

Like Hazel, we evangelicals prefer the known track and the familiar thing. We're not eager to follow the Crucified One off into the dark. And when you think about the spiritual wrenching endured by humanity during the last hundred years, our resistance makes perfect sense. Assaults from technology and free-ranging capital, wars and daily rumors of wars, economic devastation, forced mobility, cultural change so rapid as to make each generation a stranger to the last—we could spend hours and days articulating the magnitude of human anxiety represented by our parents' and grandparents' lifetimes. Add to this the specific losses that evangelicals have endured as the verities upon which they staked their claims to sure knowledge and privileged status crumbled, as they became the fools for Christ they never wished to be.

Take this weight of anxiety, of felt betrayal, of hurt and anger up into yourself, and feel it. Place it imaginatively into the dark centers of the tender young men, coming of age in the 1930s, who had the courage to imagine an intellectually respectable evangelicalism. What would they do with this weight of wounded human subjectivity? They would not, like their fundamentalist fathers, medicate it with dispensationalism's orderly charts. And thanks to them for that. But their alternative was still a kind of medication. They contrived a fortress made of logic. There they lived, walled off from the vulnerable places in their hearts where death and resurrection are truly experienced.

These young men were flesh and blood, many of them sons of abusive or distant fathers; they buried the pain of their forsakenness behind calm public personas and objective propositions. They became a common sort of male, permitting their heads no commerce with their guts. Emotional expression embarrassed them—thus their distaste for the charismatic gifts. They blanched at the word feeling, placing it last in their famous formula: "fact, faith, feeling." They identified the "morass of subjectivity" as that which a reasonable Christianity was meant to circumvent.

Though they did not clearly intend it, their new evangelicalism, even more than the old, materialized as a sustained assault on the lived truth of human subjectivity.

8. And what about you, Doug?

This is the question several friends put to me after reading an early version of this manuscript. And they were right, of course. This paper is about the mess I am, and have not wished to be. I am the rationalist who has for a lifetime walled myself off from my own proper mourning. I am loath to follow the Crucified One to the place of tears, so I have choked them back. I have lived in my head, using an infinite variety of ploys to keep my life on the known track. Like the fathers of the new evangelicalism, I am a workaholic, running from any vacuum that might suck my sadness, anger, or despair up into the center of my vision. I plan my day, my week, my year, eager to believe that chaos can be banished, including the chaos of my inner world. With a few friends I created a community in the mountains, believing that there I would be a different person, the churning of my soul would cease, my loneliness would end. I have been a compulsive reader of books, seeking refuge there from the pain of my relationships with family and friends. When I write, I belabor each word, certain that I am ever so close to capturing "the whole and the one." When I speak, it is with the conviction of one who believes he has found it. I have devoured theological systems in order to make my world cohere and avoid the invitation of Jesus into the dark.

About ten years ago, after many years of Bible reading in the context of a small worshiping community, something turned over inside me. What had been only words for me—albeit wonderful words—the words of the Bible, of Barth, Kierkegaard, Luther, and others—these words became flesh. In an unexpected moment, in the One on the cross, I encountered the Father, standing closer to me than I stood to myself; a Father more willing than I to be human—to confess and display his injury, grief, and forsakenness. In that moment, I knew God's forgiveness and compassion for me to be eternal and unfailing. My futile ploys for turning from the pain of my own human life, but leaving me lonelier still, these I understood as the blind impulses of a badly frightened creature. In a moment that felt like resurrection, compassion welled up in me—for myself first of all, for the human beings I now saw beneath the skin of every frightened and self-destructive person, and for the One who died for me.

I am far from knowing what all this means; far from comfortable with the long-silenced voices that have awakened and joined a more tumultuous inner conversation; far from fully relaxing into a trust for the process of life that I think is possible in one who has encountered a bleeding God. Occasionally, I believe I am more real, although I am not remarkably easier to live with. But I have tasted freedom, a freedom to be, even, at surprising moments, a freedom to love. And, most powerfully felt, a permission to follow my thoughts wherever they may take me; knowing that, should they take me to Sheol, God has preceded me there.

I am not immune to the appeal of a magisterial God, of objective truths, to serve as a template for my own self-presentation and as the guarantor of an orderly world. But I have begun to suspect that this is the voice of panic and of unbelief. Behind it, I hear the scurrying of a little chick dressed up as a Pharisee. It begins to look as if the God who comes in Jesus, though not particularly the one I want, is precisely the one I need.

9. The freedom to groan

Freedom is a good biblical word that's not much heard in evangelical circles. I think we have let the Enlightenment and the consumer society wrest the word away from us and redefine it in ways that are harmful to human souls. I hope our theologians will take it back. If I designed an official motto for a Christian liberal arts college, it would say this: "Free to Groan, Free to Think." My touchstone would be Paul's words in Romans 8: "the creation, … subjected to futility … has been groaning in travail … ; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, … groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as children."

Paul's invitation to groan invites us to a new kind of evangelical thinking, one that moves beyond whatever is cultic, rationalistic, Manichaean, hierarchical, defensive, and cautious in our thinking. The freedom to groan will open doors to the dark places in us from which real creativity emerges, giving at least a frail hope for a flowering of the imagination among evangelicals, of which already there are signs. The freedom to groan will bring us fully into the human situation, where we will recognize concretely, in each human being, a sister or a brother. Perhaps we will find that the Crucified One has preceded us to every part of the earth, joining us to all human flesh in suffering and in hope.

Shusaku Endo writes in an early novel: "There is something more important than responsibility. The important thing in this life is to link your sadness to the sadness of others. That is the significance of [the] cross." 3

New reminders of our responsibility as Christians to think will not get evangelicals thinking, in my opinion. But if, by God's Spirit, we encounter the Cross, not as rational mechanism or edifying syllogism but as God's revelation of the inner truth of human experience and of God's identification with and compassion for each of us, just as we are, we may be so filled with joy that we may actually be free to think.

But this joy will not make us happy all the time. So we will need a different chorus to teach our kids. I'd suggest these lines, from Leonard Cohen's song Suzanne:

Now Jesus was a sailor

when he walked upon the water

and he spent a long time watching

from his lonely wooden tower

and when he knew for certain

only drowning men would see him

he said "All men will be sailors then,

until the sea shall free them."

Doug Frank teaches at the Oregon Extension of Houghton College. He is the author of Less Than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the Twentieth Century.

1. Portions of this paragraph adapted from Jean Sulivan, Morning Light (Paulist Press, 1988), pp. 42-3.

2. Sulivan, Morning Light, p.40.

3. Shusaku Endo, The Girl I Left Behind (New Directions, 1995), p. 70.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@booksandculture.com.

Nov/Dec 1997, Vol. 3, No. 6, Page 26